Accident Prone

Just when I thought I’d make it to the end of the month without any more threats to my health, I cut my right thumb while preparing green bell pepper for tonight’s dinner, pepper steak. And tomorrow’s the first day of class. I won’t be wearing heels.

Salutations and Compliments

Eventually, when proofreading a friend’s cover letter for a job application, there will be a clash of ideas about what’s “proper.” I believe it was back in the third grade* when I learned how to write a “proper” business letter. Sign with “Yours truly” or “Very truly yours,” a very simple rule, later corroborated by Emily Post. I’ve followed it faithfully in letters, and even some formal emails, for well-over two decades.

So when my friend used “Best,” I was puzzled. And when he protested against “Yours truly,” I was annoyed. What other way is there than the “proper” way? So I Googled* business letter format, and discovered self-appointed letter-writing gurus advocating “Best” and even the dreaded “Cordially yours” as the most proper ways to close formal letters. What an outrage!

I calmed down enough to ponder the situation. Propriety is certainly a fluid concept. In Jane Austin’s time, it was apparently perfectly respectable to send one invitation to an entire household, including houseguests, but that had become vulgar by the time round two of the cult of domesticity came around. Perhaps the post-Baby Boom world didn’t know what to make of “Yours truly,” mistaking it as a term of endearment. I dare say the new recommendations are no improvement.

What does “Best” mean? “Best wishes”? But why send your best wishes to a potential employer or other business associate? That’s rather impertinent, don’t you think? “Cordially yours”? If it hasn’t retained the condescension Emily Post complained about, then how is it any different from “Warmly” or “Affectionately,” which have been disregarded as too intimate? If these were intended to avoid a misunderstanding brewing over being “Yours truly,” it appears that business letter writers have actually gravitated towards becoming increasingly informal. But what else is to be expected from people on a first name basis?

*The image in my mind is the yellow Calvert textbook that taught cursive, although I might have learned “proper” letter format from a different book around the same time.
**I used Google, but I was just wondering: Is it still “Googling” if another search engine is used?

The Church at Ground Zero

My heart just broke when I read earlier this morning about the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s treatment towards the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America over getting the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church back on its feet. I recalled the horror I felt when I first learned about the church, not on September 11, 2001, but earlier this summer while watching Ric Burns’ documentary New York. One of the interviewees, focusing on the American symbol of financial power, marveled that only the World Trade Center was targeted and only the World Trade Center was hit, adding the little church as if it were an unimportant afterthought.

He must have been right. While local Christians, churches, and parachurch organizations collected money and supplies to send to families connected with the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and to soldiers sent to Afghanistan, I heard not one word about the church building* that was utterly destroyed. And now there’s so much clamoring about building a mosque a few blocks away from the site, as if its presence is the highest affront to Christiandom, while everyone ignores the port agency’s pointed snub of a congregation that has suffered miserably and is trying to rebuild itself. People have accused American Christians of caring more about money and warfare than their Christian brethren around the world. Now we can be accused of not even caring about each other.

*I still haven’t been able to find out if anyone was killed.